E3 2011: Carmack: PCs "an order of magnitude" more powerful than consoles

Yesterday Tim caught up with id Software co-founder John Carmack for a frank discussion about the evolving technology powering the games industry, and why advances on the PC in recent years have convinced him to make a "large change of direction" in the way he develops games.

The main reason for this? Sheer processing power. When Carmack started developing Rage, consoles and the PC were roughly equivalent. Now Carmack says "we have an order of magnitude more power on the PCs."

"Now that we're looking on PCs that have ten times the horsepower of the consoles I'm making a large change in my direction" he says. "we should be focusing on building things efficiently on the PC and deploying on the consoles."

"There's several developers that if you said 'Go for it' on here we would make vastly better looking stuff if we really made that our focus."

So what's stopping that from happening? Carmack says that there are a few barriers to PC development, but the main one is cold hard economics.

"To do best of breed on here takes years to develop an engine and develop the content to go with it, and you'll just run yourself out of business doing things that way," he says.

"Those just end up being the cold hard economic truths, that you can spent $100 million working on a game now, and if you did that focused on the PC you'd be out of business."

You can watch our interview with John Carmack in its entirety right here .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom stopped being a productive human being when he realised that the beige box under his desk could play Alpha Centauri. After Deus Ex and Diablo 2 he realised he was cursed to play amazing PC games forever. He started writing about them for PC Gamer about six years ago, and is now UK web ed.